The humanity of police officers is being down played. Agápē requires, perhaps demands, that humanity must always be significantly and completely considered. Police officers have wives and husbands and children who must also endure the same risk that the officers must endure. The officer may lose his or her life and the family loses a father, a husband, a mother, or a wife. This is a real risk that must be endured each and every day.
The developing newborn must learn the difference between what is right and what is wrong. They are naive about what is right or wrong. Law-abiding adults have learned what is right according to the law. Criminals know what is right and what is wrong according to the law. Criminals choose to ignore the laws they break and, depending on their willfulness, they may ignore all laws and go as far as murder to maintain their ignorant law-breaking life style. Criminals put the lives and property of law-abiding individuals in peril. Police officers are, in general, society’s protection, your protection and mine, from that harm via their mandate to make arrests. If police officers are mandated to make arrests, they cannot walk away from confronting those individuals and situations of possible and probable criminal intent. When a police officer determines that an arrest is required, that there is enough evidence to make a legal arrest, then that officer must do what is required to prevent the escape of the individual. If such an individual does not go peacefully with the officer to have the court system evaluate whether or not a crime has been committed, then it is for the police officer to face all verbal and physical attempts that the individual or individuals employ to resist being arrested. The police officer really has no choice in the matter. As they say, “The game is on,” as to who will win the conflict over arrest or escape. Depending on the willfulness of the individual being arrested, physical harm may occur and may escalate to the point of someone’s death.
I am not a police officer, and if the reader of my words is not a police officer, then the reader is in the same situation as myself. I do not face that level of risk in my work or life. I obviously have chosen otherwise. Truth be known, I do not want to live with the risk. It is not a job that I want to do. If the reader is not a police officer then I surmise that the reader also chose not to do the job. I am very appreciative of my fellow citizens who have chosen to do such a high risk job. Do we, the citizens, appreciate our firefighters who also put their lives on the line to fight fires? The phrase, “fighting fires” is not an overstatement, just like “fighting crime” is not an overstatement. If I do not want to get into the fray to fight fires or criminals, should I not support those who do 100 %? When I get pulled over for speeding, do I immediately own my behavior and admit to speeding or do I try to talk my way out of the ticket?
Taking the humanity of police officers into account as agápē reality requires means to account for the mental and emotional stress that the risk of policing entails. The mental and emotional stress born by the families of police officers must also enter into one’s consciousness when evaluating the humanity that permeates doing the job. Once the humanity of police officers is highlighted, it must also be stated that the realistic understanding of humanity means that all individuals make mistakes in performing their jobs. Mistakes are the by-product of gaining experience, the outcome of learning by doing. If the individual wants to improve his or her job performance, he or she must take the risk of expanding the parameters of his or her performance. It is the risk of entering novel situations which puts the individual into a situation of working from a nuanced and naive position that increases the risk of making a mistake. Having reflected upon living through such a situation, the individual has learned and expanded his or her understanding of what it takes to do the job. Successfully completing the necessary training, together with previously gained experience, infuses the confidence of the individual to take calculated, well-considered risks to improve upon his or her experience.
Doctors have made mistakes. Doctors have been sued for their mistakes. Some of these suits have been won and some lost. I vaguely remember reading an article about a nurse being convicted of intentionally killing some patients. Teachers make mistakes, hopefully not lethal ones. Because humanity is imbued with the probably that mistakes will happen by someone or a few someones, does that mean that all doctors and nurses are bad people or incompetent at doing their jobs? How can I seek medical help if I believe that the mistakes of some few individuals means that all are bad or incompetent? There have been individual police officers who have also been lawbreakers. I read an article about two officers who were caught stealing. They were convicted, lost their jobs and punished. Their choice to steal, thus breaking the law, was an incorrect choice made. Those individuals needed to be held accountable for their individual behavior. Agápē reality critically requires accountability because the individuals engaged in learning by doing must be held accountable. Otherwise they will not learn from their mistakes. Worst, they may be reinforced to continue to make the same mistakes and even increase their incorrect behavior because of the lack of accountability. This is true for all professions and every kind of work. This is true for all of life’s activities.
While agápē reality requires that humanity must always be significantly and completely considered, agápē reality also critically requires accountability. This is true for doctors, lawyers, police officers, teachers, bankers, brick layers, carpenters, fathers, mothers, sales persons and all other human beings going about their daily lives including criminals and religious personnel.
Humanity and accountability viewed in the context of institutions, corporations or other such entities is a different matter. Our discourse to this point has been about the behavior of the individual or individuals apart from the institution of which the individual is the significant element. As such, humanity and accountability is about individuals. One individual’s behavior or a few individuals’ behavior should not be transposed onto the institution or corporation as a whole. However, that said, it, also, must be recognized that institutions, corporations, organizations must be held accountable as more individuals of that entity behave badly or incorrectly. Their behavior diminishes or destroys the reputation of that organization. Consequently, such institutions or organizations will fire individuals depending on the severity of the offending behavior which is the appropriate course to take.
Organizations, institutions, and corporations, etc. have policies and procedures that define their mission and behavior as an organization of individuals working to achieve its stated goals. These goals, policies, and procedures define what is held accountable regarding that institution or organization’s demonstrated humanity. While the individual’s behavior should not be transposed upon the organization as a whole, the organization is responsible for holding the individuals within that organization accountable for compliance regarding the humanity which supposedly permeates their goals, policies and procedures. These organizations, institutions, and corporations should be held accountable for not holding their individual members accountable. But, when the climate and/or unspoken or written policies, procedures or demonstrated attitudes are detrimental to humanity, then such an organization, institution or corporation should be held accountable by an authoritative force attached to our judicial system. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) is a good example. Corporations, institutions and organizations must be consistently and appropriately held accountable just like individuals.
Alleged behavior is not convicted or proved behavior. Imposed consequences are not the same as natural consequences. Imposed consequences are levied upon the individual by some entity in authority to do so. Natural consequences occur naturally due to the nature of the behavior. I throw my hammer onto the concrete basement floor because I hit my thumb instead of the nail. My hammer bounces off of the floor and hits the shin of my leg. My mother punishes me by hitting me with a belt. The hammer is a natural consequence. My mother is an imposed consequence.
Accountability of behavior leading to the possibility of an imposed consequence must be investigated first. An arrest by a police officer is warranted if there is enough evidence that a crime may have been committed. The word arrest is interesting. It can be a noun or it can also be a verb as in, “To arrest the speed of the horse pull back on the reins.” In the activity of policing, the word has both meanings. The officer arrests the movement of the individual after assessing that he or she may have committed a crime, based on the amount of evidence on hand, by taking said person to jail. It is the mandate of the police officer to arrest (to stop) the behavior of the individual if the officer has evidence to suspect a crime is in progress or has occurred. Once the individual is in handcuffs under the protection of the officer, that officer has made an arrest. It is important to note that once a person is in handcuffs, he or she cannot protect himself or herself, which means that the arresting officer is responsible for protecting that individual.
The police officer is in the business of arresting criminal behavior. The police officer is not the judge nor the jury but is the individual to initiate the first round of investigation. After the arrest, further investigation may be necessary. It is also true that there are situations in which a crime has occurred and there are no individuals to arrest because the perpetrators of the crime have left the scene. In this situation, the police first investigate until they have enough information to make an arrest. Once the individual is arrested our court system takes over. The office of the district attorney will decide if it will try the case. Grand juries might be formed. If the district attorney decides that the evidence is too weak and it is unlikely that a conviction will be achieved, then the individual is freed from incarceration. If bail had been refused, or if the individual was out on bail, then bail is lifted and the individual is free to go about his or her life unimpeded. If a trial is warranted then evidence is presented by the district attorney’s office and the lawyer(s) for the defense. The evidence can be presented before a judge without a jury in which case the judge will decide the case. If this is a trial with a jury, then the jury will decide the case. If found guilty, the offending individual(s) will face consequences pronounced by the judge at a sentencing hearing.
From the first moment that the police officer enters into an investigation of possible criminal behavior to the moment when a sentence is handed down, a highly regulated process is followed to assure that the rights of citizens of the United States of America as put forth in the Constitution of the United States are not violated. The phrase that I have heard many times in my life that gives sanctity and value to the process described above is, “No one is above the law; not even the President [of the United States of America].” This means that every citizen from every walk of life in the United States of America must adhere to the laws of the land and those laws must adhere to the Constitution.
Everyone must be held accountable. The process, also, must be held accountable. Putting aside any religious proclamations, I have never met a perfect human being. The process of the individual growing and developing from a newborn through childhood, puberty, and adolescence into a fully functioning, self-actualized adult is replete with errors and mistakes, varying in degrees of severity from mild misunderstandings to blatant, willful, life-threatening actions by ignorant criminal acts. Every individual is capable of and probably has made some mistakes along the way of his or her growth and development into adulthood, but not every mistake rises to the level of criminal act. Most individuals make understandable mistakes that are the hallmark of the learn-by-doing process of becoming educated and gaining the needed experience to become a healthy law-abiding adult who embraces voluntary compliance of laws, even though, on occasions, that individual may falter and commit a minor offense or two.
Agápē reality is about nurturing the other to achieve the highest level of humanity humanly possible. Mistakes by individuals must be understood in this light. Nurturing is about facilitating the education of the individual to see the error of the behavior and the benefits of changing those errors in the individual’s thinking and/or feelings and/or motivations, etc. Agápē is first of all about accountability, and then it is about rehabilitation. It is not about punishment.
However, since agápē reality is critically about accountability, it must also be endowed with a high level of humanity. Without accountability, learning is less likely to occur. Behavior prompted by errors in thinking, feelings, and motivations, etcetera must be arrested before rehabilitation can begin. The level of humanity displayed by the individual is directly correlated to the level of consciousness that the individual possesses. To facilitate the humanity in the individual, the facilitation of that individual’s consciousness must be engaged. Since learning and reflection are essential to promote an expanding consciousness, mistakes will inevitably be scattered along the path of that development and expansion due to the learn-by-doing structure. The development of the consciousness can appear to be a spiraling path. As mistakes are made and behavior modified or rehabilitated toward sustainable growth and expansion, the spiraling path winds upward or forward or in both directions. If mistakes continue to be made, but the behavior is not modified or rehabilitated, then the spiraling path winds downward or backward or both. In agápē reality, accountability must be infused with as high a level of humanity as is possible. I hypothesize my belief that the more serious the error, the higher the level of humanity is required to facilitate the rehabilitation. As stated before, agápē reality requires the highest level of humanity but that humanity must also be endowed with a consistently applied, firm accountability.
This reflection upon policing has thus far focused for the most part on the errors in the judgements, feelings, and motivations of an individual behaving criminally. Corruption is about the undermining of a process or an institution or organization. As an English studies major in college, I had to write many essays on various literary texts. One essay that I wrote has pertinence to the consideration of the issue of corruption. My essay concerned the villainy of Shakespeare’s character, Iago, in his play Othello. The premise that I sought to prove was that Iago was an evil tempter. Like the devil or Satan, Iago would simply whisper in the ear of Othello and others. Iago was an instigator of tragedy. His role in the Shakespearian play was not to commit overt tragic acts. His role was to whisper in ears and to deceive and move other characters to do tragic deeds leading to death and mayhem. To me, this was the classic satanic evil of the biblical snake whispering to Eve, who in turn tempts and moves Adam to eat of the tree of knowledge, an act that would lead to Adam and Eve being thrown out of the kingdom of heaven to live a life of human hardship, to experience the pain of loss and to struggle to survive.
What Iago does in Shakespeare’s play Othello is what Satan does in Christianity. They corrupt. From a Christian view, evil, in the form of Satan, corrupts what was once good, healthy, life-sustaining and beneficial to humankind. This corrupting evil is achieved through acting upon innocence, naiveté and bias with whispered rumors, deceits, half truths, misdirections and falsehoods, etc. Iago feigns loyalty and love for Othello while acting out his intense loathing of Othello seeking his utter demise. Iago will eventually corrupt the loyalty felt between Othello and his great love, Desdemona. Through his twisting, conniving words, deceits, and falsehoods, Iago will cause others to move against Othello; cause Othello to doubt the true, deep love that Desdemona has for him, and ultimately move Othello to kill her. Simply put, Iago seeks to poison anyone and everyone he can to go against Othello, a respected man with a strong military reputation and a demonstrated loyalty to the people Iago seeks to verbally poison. In short, Iago corrupts the harmony of Othello’s world. The fact that Othello chooses Iago as the individual who will safely transport Desdemona to his side in Cyprus with Shakespeare’s epithet, “honest Iago” signals to me the power, depth, and skillfulness of ‘deceitful Iago’. When Desdemona’s father says to Othello, “Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see: She has deceived her father, may do thee,” clearly demonstrates that Shakespeare’s play Othello is about the evil of deceitfulness, the ease with which humans are deceived, and the tragedy that follows.
Shakespeare’s play Othello is about the subtlety and utter destruction caused by the corrupting force of an individual who is skilled at preying and capitalizing upon human weaknesses with whispered rumors, deceits, half-truths, misdirections, and falsehoods. Preying upon the human weakness of greed is also a tool for corrupting characters. A single act of murder destroys one life. The death of Desdemona at the hands of her great love, Othello, is not about the destruction of her life. This act is about the precipitating evil and corruption as presented through the character of Iago, that utterly destroys the world presented in Shakespeare’s Othello.
Like the world of Othello, institutions, organizations and corporations can be corrupted. Corruption is a social disease that destroys the health and benefit of institutions, organizations or any group of individuals who cooperate to achieve a common good. As more and more institutions and organizations of a given culture or society become infected with corruption and fail to perform their original mission, that society or nation becomes more and more unhealthy. Unabated corruption destroys. I believe that this is also a message to be found in Othello.
Agápē reality is a vaccine to combat the illness of corruption that plagues organizations and groups of individuals seeking to cooperate to work toward a common goal to benefit the whole. Revenge does not drive the accountability required by agápē reality. Incorrect (bad) behavior must be arrested and the individuals’ thinking, feelings, and perceptions, must be rehabilitated. Policing, in agápē reality, is to arrest behavior and rehabilitate ignorant individuals, not kill them. However the corruption as personified in the character of Iago serves as a warning of humanity’s capacity to become corrupted by a force preying on the human weaknesses that allows corruption to take hold and spread throughout the social fabric.
Before leaving the issue of policing and moving on to other matters of concern, it is very important to highlight the dilemma embodied in the struggle to balance two qualities within agápē that can cause great tension: its absolute aspiration for achieving the highest level of humanity possible, and its absolute requirement for a constantly applied accountability. This struggle for balance between humanity and accountability is central to policing.
The humanity of every police office, single or married, must be of great concern and taken into account each and every time that officer is attempting to comply with the mandate to arrest behavior when appropriate to do so. The dilemma rises to high levels when the officer encounters an individual who is not naive but ignores the damage his or her attempted criminal behavior inflicts on society as a whole and willfully chooses to resist any and all compliance with the arresting police officer. This is an individual who truly refuses voluntary compliance and is most inclined to embrace catch-me-if-you-can which could easily morph into arrest-me-if-you-can. When the physical altercation occurs, it is not a play fight. It is not a sports event. It is not polite. It is at times vicious. If you are in the fray, you must think about what to do to get the upper hand physically. It is a fluid dynamic. Obviously, if weapons are involved, it becomes even more dangerous. The police officer is most certainly armed with a lethal weapon, which he or she must make sure that the other combatant does not rip it from the officer’s holster. If you have never been in such a fray, you do not have the critical experience to know what the human officer must endure physically, emotionally and mentally. Inexperienced outside observers who have no learning-by-doing experience and who are viewers of such frays probably do not perceive everything that is happening during a fight, especially if the combatants are entwined and locked arm in arm with hands moving about grabbing and punching. Other situations occur when the combatants have significant distance between them. One command police officers strategically want to see obeyed is the, “show me your hands,” command. It is a matter of safety to see if there is a weapon with which to contend. There is also the possibility that the officer has encountered an individual who has planned a suicide by police action. An individual being emotionally unhealthy decides to commit suicide and plans the suicide by confronting the police and putting themselves in a situation in which the office must shoot such a person. There may be some readers who believe that such an individual does not exist. I have personally viewed a police training video of a man, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in a suit and tie, pacing around a car that is on fire and engulfed in flames. The viewer of the video can hear fire truck sirens in the distance. Just as the firetrucks are entering the scene, this young man dives through the blown out windshield into the interior of the now inferno that was once a viable automobile. Human beings are very unpredictable. A given human being in a stressful circumstance can, at any time decide to do the unimaginable. This is a realization that every police officer must always heed.
The general public should not require any police officer to embrace martyrdom in the performance of his or her duty to arrest the behavior of individuals who may or may not have broken the law. Any questioning of the appropriateness of the officer’s performance of his or her mandated duties should be investigated and evaluated by individuals who have experienced learning via the learn-by-doing form of education. The humanity and accountability of the potential law-breaker should be taken fully into account, and the same should be the case for every police officer, as required in agápē reality.